Two-dimensional extreme skin depth engineering for CMOS photonics

TL;DR

This paper introduces a two-dimensional extreme skin depth engineering technique for CMOS photonics, enabling dense integration and improved functionalities by manipulating evanescent fields in waveguides.

Contribution

The work demonstrates the implementation of 2D e-skid in CMOS photonics, allowing for large gap, bendless directional couplers with broad bandwidths.

Findings

Successful experimental validation of 2D e-skid in CMOS photonics

Creation of large gap, bendless directional couplers

Strong coupling achieved with a 1.44 μm gap

Abstract

Extreme skin depth engineering (e-skid) can be applied to integrated photonics to manipulate the evanescent field of a waveguide. Here we demonstrate that e-skid can be implemented in two directions in order to deterministically engineer the evanescent wave allowing for dense integration with enhanced functionalities. In particular, by increasing the skin depth, we enable the creation of large gap, bendless directional couplers with large operational bandwidth. Here we experimentally validate two-dimensional e-skid for integrated photonics in a CMOS photonics foundry and demonstrate strong coupling with a gap of 1.44 {\mu}m.